Sometimes surprise can lead to the best plot twists.
The gist is that the show had a PLAN as opposed to being a half baked concept presented in a pitch. I think that a lot of shows would be much better if they had to present a series of overarching events instead of just a concept.
Alas, the 60/30 minute episode is far easier to syndicate. Hence, thats all the money guys are interested in.
I kinda like the space-sail concept myself. However a spinning asteroid could put a kabosh on the whole thing, the lines would tangle and collapse the sail. The first step would need to nullify any spin on the asteroid with respect to the sun. The second stage would deploy the sails. Of course it would probably be impossible to land on a large asteroid with a rapid spin.
Likewise, lasers and solar refocusing would have no effect on a spinning asteroid since the effects would be distributed across the axis of the body instead of one direction.
I'd have to agree, a high energy collision would probably be the be the "sure fire" way to nudge the body either accelerate or decellerate the body enough to avoid a collision.
Re:Do not think outside the box:
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
A hexagon (honeycomb) would be the most efficient as far as preserving material. This may become more important as diamond wafers will intially be orders of magnitude more expesive than the equivalent silicon wafer.
If your so confident, why don't you volunteer to remove asbestos without a environmental suit.
There is a way you can do it on the cheap. Buy a pair of break pads (they still have asbestos) and a power grinder. Grind the break pads all the way down in a closed room with no ventalation and no breathing apparatus.
Wait three years for your breathing to become increasingly challenged. Get cancer. Die, and save us all from your ignorance.
Given that the final shuttle accident report was released today, I'm surprised that no-one else has touched on this topic.
The Reinforced-Carbon-Carbon panels have been noted to get very pitted and pot-marked over time. Indeed there has always been serious concerns over this component.
Given the chemical process for synthesizing diamond wafers, isn't it reasonable to deposit a single sheet part super heat conductive material that would replace the reinforced-carbon-carbon on the space shuttle wings. Diamond is the hardest substance known to man. Isn't it reasonable that such a macro-application would be reasonable and logical.
Other near term application could be heat sinks in other industrial super-heated applications. I could even imagine sythesizing the linings of cannon barrels out of sheet diamond. How about aircraft "black boxes" made out of sythesized diamond so that they absoluetly CANNOT be destroyed.
On more application could be to organically grow the hull of a small submarine capable of diving to tremendous depths. A sufficiently polished application could be optically transparent!!!! That is no portholes required. Remember "transparent aluminum" from star trek. A chemically deposited transparent diamond panel could probably kick it's ass in strenth.
How about armor for tanks, helicopters and planes???? A thin panel may be stronger then the most exotic alloy.
A sufficiently advaned systhesizing process may be capable of produce "machine grade" parts that will effectively NEVER wear.
The 20th century was the century of steel. With a reliable diamond production process, and technology that generates carbon nanon-tube threads (as well as bucky ball "bearings"), this could be the century of carbon!!!!!!
In this respect, I think that the beginning of 2001 actually took a page from "Fantasia". It was a ballet of space machines dancing to music.
People ejoyed watching dancing hippos set to classical music in Fantatsia. Dancing spacecraft shouldn't be that much of a torment to endure.
The one thing about "The Blue Danube" is that it isn't exactly a "smooth" piece. It's meter is slightly of kilter and makes it sound as if the conductor is drunk. Perhaps this was part of the statement and a prelude to HAL. The machines are seemingly controlling things perfectly but something is ever so slightly off kilter, perhaps waiting to bust.
Did you know that HAL 2000 is widely regarded as the most sinister villain in the history of cinema???
It's his relative innocence and lack of emotion that makes him so sinister. The struggle that evolves between HAL and Dave is enough to carry the film.
If you watch 2010, I think some things will become clearer. Though, it is not as good a film as 2001.
I was very dissapointed by the "flattened" particle projection (shockwave) produced by the exploding death star and the exploding battleship in "Phantom Menace". In space, the distribution should be fairly uniform and produced a sphere of exploding debris.
The article you reference implies that the nature of an expanding universe has changed the speed of light.
The truly rock solid laws won't change because those are measured by the here an now. They would only require teaking to allow for infintessimal changes over the milleniums of time.
The truly innovative theories aren't affected much either because most of them will be thrown away or renovated anyway. That's why they call them theories. And by the way, most of them deal with the here and now as well.
If C is non-constant, then the cosmologists will have some work to do. This is not a mind-blower, Stephen Hawking discussed this in his book "A brief history of time" which is for lamen. Indeed he anticipates that the laws of physics right after the big bang would have been in flux as the universe unrolled from a singularity, into a super-heated cloud of matter/anti-matter collisions and then ultimately into something stable and tangible.
For all practical purposes, space has a pressure of ZERO!!!!!! An hence is unable to transfer sound from wave phenomenon. The closest things to waves in space are ripples of space-time itself called gravity waves. There is no ether, hence C and the FACT of relativity.
Actually, it would have been REALLY cool if they actually did it that way.
In other words, when people spoke over the com, they made them into "telphone" voices. To here the explosions through those coms and then go to static would have been a nice effect.
However, scale that up by a zillion times: supernovas do have shockwaves. Saying that, "explosions in space have no shockwaves" is a bit broad.
The shockwave from a nuclear explosion arises from pressure produced by super-heated gas. Even within super-excited particles, there isn't enough density in space to create a distinct pressurized region which will expel background matter in a distinct fashion. Exciting the background particles in space would simply cause them to move alter course and move faster, they would not be made to move in a uniform pattern (like a shockwave).
Yes, but a particle burst is not a "wave" phenomenon.
If you look at nuclear blast footage you will see an intitial thrust of gas followed by a backwash. This is what charactarizes it as wave behavior. The immense presure oscillates back and forth until it has been neutralized. It's the same phenomenon as dropping a stone into a pond of water.
The great effect from a nuclear blast is the pressure from the shockwave of local super-heated gas. Since there is no supply of gas to be super-heated and pressurized, you won't get the truly explosive shockwave. Then radiation will radiate evenly without and "explosive" effect (beyond the vaporized bomb material and any local "target" material).
If your too close to the radiation source, you'll get baked. If your right next to the radiation source, you'll be super-heated and vaporized.
Well, I would suspect that some of material would be vaporized and that would also cause a rush of gas.
This is a reason why nukes aren't an option for destroying meteors if they are on a collision course with earth. Unless you literally buried the bomb inside the meteor (like in Armageddon) it would do little more than give the meteor a sunburn.
If particles from an exploding item (death star) struck your vessel, you would here the vibrations of your hull.
If radiation was super-heating your hull you would here it "creak and groan" as the various metals in the frame expanded at a different rate.
Regarding the movies. Sound is a prime medium for expressing what exactly happens. Dialog is often the only sound on the set that makes it through to the final product. In some cases even the dialog is dropped-in when a live location is too-noisy. Virtually all the sound in a movie is manufactured the same way it was in radio days. Even the gunshot sounds are completely fake. Gunshots sound like fire-crakers, not the deep booms as portrayed by hollywood.
So when they drop in spectacular "booms" when space ships blow up, it's just business as usual. None of the other sounds in movie's are "realistic". It's all about communicating a mood or concept through audio. Why should space be an exception?;-)
I told my brother how much I like "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon".
His response, "people flying around is just unrealistic."
My response, "yeah, like Superman is realistic".
His response, "Well, that's American, it's differn't"
Yeah, car chases and gun-fights, and fist fights from traditional films are the most unrealistic things imagineable. They also tend to screw up ANYTHING medical or technical. Apparantly, Cops are potrayed fairly unrealistically as well.
I don't think we should try to constrain any movie to reality. That's what people go to movies for, to get away from reality and explore fantasy. If it was realistic, it wouldn't be a movie, it would be a documentary.
Star Trek: Alien species can communicate without even exchanging any sort of dictionary. All ships have exactly the same concept of "up" and "down." It is also assumed that there is an absolute time (even though it is not explicitly stated). The theory of relativity simply does not exist.
Actually, Gene Roddenberry put some serious thought into these topics.
Alien Communication:
Star Fleet personnell are outfitted with a device called the "universal translator". It apparantly works on a sub-conscious level and allows the brain to automatically speak foreign languages. They've done some episodes where the Universal Translators didn't work and saw the results.
Personally I kinda like all the alien languages that you get in "Star Wars". It's a lot funner and makes things a lot richer in the same way that the various languages spoken in "Lord of the Rings" makes things a little more interesting.
Relativity Time: Star Trek dates things with "Star Dates". The Star Dates take relevatistic effects in effect so that everything evens out.
Relative Travel: In Star Trek, the ships don't travel faster than lite in normal space. The move to an adjacent space where the laws of physics are slightly more lenient. This allows the starships to leave earth and return without suffering the "twin paradox" effect too badly.
X-Men: X-Men is a pure fantasy universe (like ALL comic books). Stan Lee is a pure story-teller. The Marvel universe reflects his disinterest with technobobbles. He just say's it works a certain way and it does. The characters, and their interaction, is the important part.
This is the reason that studios add "bad science" to movies. 2001 was a true science fiction film.
Star Wars and Star Trek are NOT sci-fi. George Lucas himself described Star Wars as a "Space Western". Star Trek is more like space sociology. They explore current sociological issues through the lense of a more ideal social future. Every once in a while Star Trek episodes hit on a sci-fi topic, but that is rare. In fact the most sci-fi movie was Star Trek 1, which everybody thought was pretty boring.
The best science fiction of late was "Contact" starring Jody Foster. That movie was lambasted as being boring and plotless. When the "asteroid" concept hit hollywood, two movies were made. The action packed "Armageddon" starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck contrasted with the thought provoking "Deep Impact" starring Elijah Wood, Morgan Freeman (the first black portrayal of an American president) and Tea Leaoni. Armageddon was the more popular (and pretty stupid in my opinion). Deep Impact was very thought provoking and brilliant but took a deep second to the action flick.
The best blend I've seen lately is 'Minority Report', 'The Sixth Day' and 'The Matrix: Reloaded'. All present a sci-fi plot in an action mode with action stars.
The brilliance of Sci-Fi is that it challenges us to think. The plot is often incomprehensible without a little deep thinking. Thats what science fiction is for, to challenge us.
Many people won't get 2001, it requires thought and interpretation. A lot of people really liked Matrix: Reloaded, but ultimately didn't have a clue of the real meaning of the film beyond the fighting and chase scenes. Some people look for different things in movies. I enjoy a good think and enjoyed 2001. If you don't enjoy thought than the entire sci-fi genre probably isn't for you.
In the article, they mentioned that external "docks" for computers would become available. This is effectively what your describing with firewire.
The big difference is that the NextCard is actually a direct extension of the systems expansion bus. You cannot accomplish this with Firewire as it was never intended to be the systems main way of expansion.
Yes, 3800 RPM drives do kinda suck. That's why 2.5" inch drives are now available in 5400RPM and 7200RPM.
I've noticed that computer hardware does not advance altogether. One area surges ahead and then others catch up to take advantage. Three years ago, the main bus was holding everything hostage. Now it's the PCI bus that's really the slowest component. PCI-Express was built for expansion has reportedly has about 15 years of growth ponetential.
The computers coming out in the next few years will be really exciting as the entire infrastructure will have been swapped out to technologies that have great bandwidth headroom.
Out -------- Serial, PS/2, Parallel, IDE, Floppy, PCI, Single Channel Single Access RAM, PC-Card (legacy ISA), CD-ROM, square tubes displays, low-res LCD
Consumers make products obsolete. Believe me, most companies would prefer to put out the same shit every year and pocket R&D money.
Rather, your just looking at the evolution of computer technology. It's actually a lot better these days. In the beginning buying a Computer carried the risk that your entire platform would become obsolete without possibility of migration (Commodore 64, Atari, Apple2, etc...)
Ultimately, the PCI Express/NewCard is meant to bring a level of convergence between desktops and portables thus providing savings for the industry and the consumer. It also makes expansion easier as many people would rather not open their computer to install a PCI card.
The NewCard represents somewhat of a paradigm shift. It's effectively directed at ALL segements of the computer marketplace. Basically you would have a very modular capability that could easily be moved between notebooks, tablets, and desktops. In the case of the USB2.0 based stuff, it could even pop-up in handheld devices like PocketPC/Palm and future eBook readers.
The NewCard will also add capabilities to notebooks that simply weren't possible before using Card-Bus. For example, laptop graphics could be easily upgraded to newer capabilities. TV/radio, etc.. capabilities will be very easy to add or swap out with a desktop.
Just remember that this is an EXPANSION format, not an interconnect format. 10BT, 802.11, Firewire will still be important for interconnection of standalone devices (MP3 players, PocketPC, DataArchives, networks, etc..)
Regarding SmartMedia, MemStick, CompactFlash, etc... I don't think these were ever really meant for expansion on laptops when PC-Cards are available. Rather, they're meant primarily as floppy replacements, especially in conjuction with digital camera use (digital film).
SecureDigital/Memory Stick will still be relevant for expansion in handhelds. The bandwidth of NewCard is just way too much for handheld devices to handle.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes surprise can lead to the best plot twists.
The gist is that the show had a PLAN as opposed to being a half baked concept presented in a pitch. I think that a lot of shows would be much better if they had to present a series of overarching events instead of just a concept.
Alas, the 60/30 minute episode is far easier to syndicate. Hence, thats all the money guys are interested in.
I kinda like the space-sail concept myself. However a spinning asteroid could put a kabosh on the whole thing, the lines would tangle and collapse the sail. The first step would need to nullify any spin on the asteroid with respect to the sun. The second stage would deploy the sails. Of course it would probably be impossible to land on a large asteroid with a rapid spin.
Likewise, lasers and solar refocusing would have no effect on a spinning asteroid since the effects would be distributed across the axis of the body instead of one direction.
I'd have to agree, a high energy collision would probably be the be the "sure fire" way to nudge the body either accelerate or decellerate the body enough to avoid a collision.
A hexagon (honeycomb) would be the most efficient as far as preserving material. This may become more important as diamond wafers will intially be orders of magnitude more expesive than the equivalent silicon wafer.
If your so confident, why don't you volunteer to remove asbestos without a environmental suit.
There is a way you can do it on the cheap. Buy a pair of break pads (they still have asbestos) and a power grinder. Grind the break pads all the way down in a closed room with no ventalation and no breathing apparatus.
Wait three years for your breathing to become increasingly challenged. Get cancer. Die, and save us all from your ignorance.
Given that the final shuttle accident report was released today, I'm surprised that no-one else has touched on this topic.
The Reinforced-Carbon-Carbon panels have been noted to get very pitted and pot-marked over time. Indeed there has always been serious concerns over this component.
Given the chemical process for synthesizing diamond wafers, isn't it reasonable to deposit a single sheet part super heat conductive material that would replace the reinforced-carbon-carbon on the space shuttle wings. Diamond is the hardest substance known to man. Isn't it reasonable that such a macro-application would be reasonable and logical.
Other near term application could be heat sinks in other industrial super-heated applications. I could even imagine sythesizing the linings of cannon barrels out of sheet diamond. How about aircraft "black boxes" made out of sythesized diamond so that they absoluetly CANNOT be destroyed.
On more application could be to organically grow the hull of a small submarine capable of diving to tremendous depths. A sufficiently polished application could be optically transparent!!!! That is no portholes required. Remember "transparent aluminum" from star trek. A chemically deposited transparent diamond panel could probably kick it's ass in strenth.
How about armor for tanks, helicopters and planes???? A thin panel may be stronger then the most exotic alloy.
A sufficiently advaned systhesizing process may be capable of produce "machine grade" parts that will effectively NEVER wear.
The 20th century was the century of steel. With a reliable diamond production process, and technology that generates carbon nanon-tube threads (as well as bucky ball "bearings"), this could be the century of carbon!!!!!!
In this respect, I think that the beginning of 2001 actually took a page from "Fantasia". It was a ballet of space machines dancing to music.
People ejoyed watching dancing hippos set to classical music in Fantatsia. Dancing spacecraft shouldn't be that much of a torment to endure.
The one thing about "The Blue Danube" is that it isn't exactly a "smooth" piece. It's meter is slightly of kilter and makes it sound as if the conductor is drunk. Perhaps this was part of the statement and a prelude to HAL. The machines are seemingly controlling things perfectly but something is ever so slightly off kilter, perhaps waiting to bust.
Did you know that HAL 2000 is widely regarded as the most sinister villain in the history of cinema???
It's his relative innocence and lack of emotion that makes him so sinister. The struggle that evolves between HAL and Dave is enough to carry the film.
If you watch 2010, I think some things will become clearer. Though, it is not as good a film as 2001.
He was president of "Earth Federation" not the president of the US. But I was glad to see that potrayal their as well.
I was very dissapointed by the "flattened" particle projection (shockwave) produced by the exploding death star and the exploding battleship in "Phantom Menace". In space, the distribution should be fairly uniform and produced a sphere of exploding debris.
Very few.
The article you reference implies that the nature of an expanding universe has changed the speed of light.
The truly rock solid laws won't change because those are measured by the here an now. They would only require teaking to allow for infintessimal changes over the milleniums of time.
The truly innovative theories aren't affected much either because most of them will be thrown away or renovated anyway. That's why they call them theories. And by the way, most of them deal with the here and now as well.
If C is non-constant, then the cosmologists will have some work to do. This is not a mind-blower, Stephen Hawking discussed this in his book "A brief history of time" which is for lamen. Indeed he anticipates that the laws of physics right after the big bang would have been in flux as the universe unrolled from a singularity, into a super-heated cloud of matter/anti-matter collisions and then ultimately into something stable and tangible.
For all practical purposes, space has a pressure of ZERO!!!!!! An hence is unable to transfer sound from wave phenomenon. The closest things to waves in space are ripples of space-time itself called gravity waves. There is no ether, hence C and the FACT of relativity.
Actually, it would have been REALLY cool if they actually did it that way.
In other words, when people spoke over the com, they made them into "telphone" voices. To here the explosions through those coms and then go to static would have been a nice effect.
However, scale that up by a zillion times: supernovas do have shockwaves. Saying that, "explosions in space have no shockwaves" is a bit broad.
The shockwave from a nuclear explosion arises from pressure produced by super-heated gas. Even within super-excited particles, there isn't enough density in space to create a distinct pressurized region which will expel background matter in a distinct fashion. Exciting the background particles in space would simply cause them to move alter course and move faster, they would not be made to move in a uniform pattern (like a shockwave).
Yes, but a particle burst is not a "wave" phenomenon.
If you look at nuclear blast footage you will see an intitial thrust of gas followed by a backwash. This is what charactarizes it as wave behavior. The immense presure oscillates back and forth until it has been neutralized. It's the same phenomenon as dropping a stone into a pond of water.
The great effect from a nuclear blast is the pressure from the shockwave of local super-heated gas. Since there is no supply of gas to be super-heated and pressurized, you won't get the truly explosive shockwave. Then radiation will radiate evenly without and "explosive" effect (beyond the vaporized bomb material and any local "target" material).
If your too close to the radiation source, you'll get baked. If your right next to the radiation source, you'll be super-heated and vaporized.
Well, I would suspect that some of material would be vaporized and that would also cause a rush of gas.
This is a reason why nukes aren't an option for destroying meteors if they are on a collision course with earth. Unless you literally buried the bomb inside the meteor (like in Armageddon) it would do little more than give the meteor a sunburn.
If particles from an exploding item (death star) struck your vessel, you would here the vibrations of your hull.
;-)
If radiation was super-heating your hull you would here it "creak and groan" as the various metals in the frame expanded at a different rate.
Regarding the movies. Sound is a prime medium for expressing what exactly happens. Dialog is often the only sound on the set that makes it through to the final product. In some cases even the dialog is dropped-in when a live location is too-noisy. Virtually all the sound in a movie is manufactured the same way it was in radio days. Even the gunshot sounds are completely fake. Gunshots sound like fire-crakers, not the deep booms as portrayed by hollywood.
So when they drop in spectacular "booms" when space ships blow up, it's just business as usual. None of the other sounds in movie's are "realistic". It's all about communicating a mood or concept through audio. Why should space be an exception?
Hehe,
I told my brother how much I like "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon".
His response, "people flying around is just unrealistic."
My response, "yeah, like Superman is realistic".
His response, "Well, that's American, it's differn't"
Yeah, car chases and gun-fights, and fist fights from traditional films are the most unrealistic things imagineable. They also tend to screw up ANYTHING medical or technical. Apparantly, Cops are potrayed fairly unrealistically as well.
I don't think we should try to constrain any movie to reality. That's what people go to movies for, to get away from reality and explore fantasy. If it was realistic, it wouldn't be a movie, it would be a documentary.
Agreed. Stupidity for it's own sake is pretty funny (Beavis and Butthead, Tom Greene (etc)...).
Pretentious stupidity is annoying (Battlefield Earth, The (new) Hulk (etc)...).
Star Trek: Alien species can communicate without even exchanging any sort of dictionary. All ships have exactly the same concept of "up" and "down." It is also assumed that there is an absolute time (even though it is not explicitly stated). The theory of relativity simply does not exist.
Actually, Gene Roddenberry put some serious thought into these topics.
Alien Communication:
Star Fleet personnell are outfitted with a device called the "universal translator". It apparantly works on a sub-conscious level and allows the brain to automatically speak foreign languages. They've done some episodes where the Universal Translators didn't work and saw the results.
Personally I kinda like all the alien languages that you get in "Star Wars". It's a lot funner and makes things a lot richer in the same way that the various languages spoken in "Lord of the Rings" makes things a little more interesting.
Relativity Time:
Star Trek dates things with "Star Dates". The Star Dates take relevatistic effects in effect so that everything evens out.
Relative Travel:
In Star Trek, the ships don't travel faster than lite in normal space. The move to an adjacent space where the laws of physics are slightly more lenient. This allows the starships to leave earth and return without suffering the "twin paradox" effect too badly.
X-Men:
X-Men is a pure fantasy universe (like ALL comic books). Stan Lee is a pure story-teller. The Marvel universe reflects his disinterest with technobobbles. He just say's it works a certain way and it does. The characters, and their interaction, is the important part.
This is the reason that studios add "bad science" to movies. 2001 was a true science fiction film.
Star Wars and Star Trek are NOT sci-fi. George Lucas himself described Star Wars as a "Space Western". Star Trek is more like space sociology. They explore current sociological issues through the lense of a more ideal social future. Every once in a while Star Trek episodes hit on a sci-fi topic, but that is rare. In fact the most sci-fi movie was Star Trek 1, which everybody thought was pretty boring.
The best science fiction of late was "Contact" starring Jody Foster. That movie was lambasted as being boring and plotless. When the "asteroid" concept hit hollywood, two movies were made. The action packed "Armageddon" starring Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck contrasted with the thought provoking "Deep Impact" starring Elijah Wood, Morgan Freeman (the first black portrayal of an American president) and Tea Leaoni. Armageddon was the more popular (and pretty stupid in my opinion). Deep Impact was very thought provoking and brilliant but took a deep second to the action flick.
The best blend I've seen lately is 'Minority Report', 'The Sixth Day' and 'The Matrix: Reloaded'. All present a sci-fi plot in an action mode with action stars.
The brilliance of Sci-Fi is that it challenges us to think. The plot is often incomprehensible without a little deep thinking. Thats what science fiction is for, to challenge us.
Many people won't get 2001, it requires thought and interpretation. A lot of people really liked Matrix: Reloaded, but ultimately didn't have a clue of the real meaning of the film beyond the fighting and chase scenes. Some people look for different things in movies. I enjoy a good think and enjoyed 2001. If you don't enjoy thought than the entire sci-fi genre probably isn't for you.
In the article, they mentioned that external "docks" for computers would become available. This is effectively what your describing with firewire.
The big difference is that the NextCard is actually a direct extension of the systems expansion bus. You cannot accomplish this with Firewire as it was never intended to be the systems main way of expansion.
Integrated Smart Card readers are available on many notebooks. IBM provides them on a lot of their notebooks as a security token.
Nope, SD is still way smaller than the Type 2 NewCard. It's also a fairly standard on PocketPC and many brands of camera now.
I don't think that SD on notebook was ever intended for expansion, only for plugging in your camera film or using SD "as floppy".
Yes, 3800 RPM drives do kinda suck. That's why 2.5" inch drives are now available in 5400RPM and 7200RPM.
... WOW!!!!
I've noticed that computer hardware does not advance altogether. One area surges ahead and then others catch up to take advantage. Three years ago, the main bus was holding everything hostage. Now it's the PCI bus that's really the slowest component. PCI-Express was built for expansion has reportedly has about 15 years of growth ponetential.
The computers coming out in the next few years will be really exciting as the entire infrastructure will have been swapped out to technologies that have great bandwidth headroom.
Out
--------
Serial, PS/2, Parallel, IDE, Floppy, PCI, Single Channel Single Access RAM, PC-Card (legacy ISA), CD-ROM, square tubes displays, low-res LCD
In
--------
USB2, Firewire, Serial ATA, Flash Cards, PCI-Express, DVD, Double/Quad Channel DDR2 RAM, NewCard, Wireless, Wide Screed high-res LCD panels
Your old laptop should work for a while. But when you go to upgrade
Consumers make products obsolete. Believe me, most companies would prefer to put out the same shit every year and pocket R&D money.
Rather, your just looking at the evolution of computer technology. It's actually a lot better these days. In the beginning buying a Computer carried the risk that your entire platform would become obsolete without possibility of migration (Commodore 64, Atari, Apple2, etc...)
Ultimately, the PCI Express/NewCard is meant to bring a level of convergence between desktops and portables thus providing savings for the industry and the consumer. It also makes expansion easier as many people would rather not open their computer to install a PCI card.
The NewCard represents somewhat of a paradigm shift. It's effectively directed at ALL segements of the computer marketplace. Basically you would have a very modular capability that could easily be moved between notebooks, tablets, and desktops. In the case of the USB2.0 based stuff, it could even pop-up in handheld devices like PocketPC/Palm and future eBook readers.
The NewCard will also add capabilities to notebooks that simply weren't possible before using Card-Bus. For example, laptop graphics could be easily upgraded to newer capabilities. TV/radio, etc.. capabilities will be very easy to add or swap out with a desktop.
Just remember that this is an EXPANSION format, not an interconnect format. 10BT, 802.11, Firewire will still be important for interconnection of standalone devices (MP3 players, PocketPC, DataArchives, networks, etc..)
Regarding SmartMedia, MemStick, CompactFlash, etc... I don't think these were ever really meant for expansion on laptops when PC-Cards are available. Rather, they're meant primarily as floppy replacements, especially in conjuction with digital camera use (digital film).
SecureDigital/Memory Stick will still be relevant for expansion in handhelds. The bandwidth of NewCard is just way too much for handheld devices to handle.